


The Drifter

by Sintari (OriginalSintari)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Demon Blood Aftermath, Episode: s05e03 Free to Be You and Me, Hell Trauma, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Pining, Pre-Slash, Season/Series 05, VERY slight suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 20:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21855049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OriginalSintari/pseuds/Sintari
Summary: “It’s been thirty-nine days and he isn’t counting the hours anymore since Sam, at the base of Sundance Mountain, batted his eyelashes at some deer hunter and gave the Impala what sure as hell looked to Dean like a final pat before finally doing what Dean’s half expected half his life.”Sam and Dean choose to separate, but a case has other ideas. Whatcouldhave happened during 5x03 Free to Be You and Me.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 25
Kudos: 42





	The Drifter

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by my lovely friend [Fledhyris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fledhyris/pseuds/Fledhyris). Check out her fics!
> 
> Not to spoil anything, but this rating will definitely change in an explicit direction in a future chapter.

Dean wakes up driving.

It’s been thirty-nine days and he isn’t counting the hours anymore since Sam, at the base of Sundance Mountain, batted his eyelashes at some deer hunter and gave the Impala what sure as hell looked to Dean like a final pat before finally doing what Dean’s half expected half his life.

Somehow, he’s kept her between the ditches, not sure if he only slept for a microsecond or if a lifetime of driving these paved over Midwestern wagon tracks means he truly isn’t a liar when he brags to Sam that he can cross this whole goddamn country on two-lane roads and dead asleep.

He looks to Sam’s- to the passenger seat before the realization hits him again, like it does five seconds after he wakes up, that there’s nobody there to institute some ridiculous forty-eight-hour rule about rest stops.

A thousand times a day he looks at where Sam’s face should be, then feels for his amulet and that’s gone, too. It only takes a baker’s dozen “Hey, remembers…” before he remembers to only say them in his mind.

He passes his thumb over the action of his Colt just to feel that it’s there. A self-soothing habit dad trained him out of before he ever elbowed through the doors of a high school, but then Dean’s doing a lot of things his father wouldn’t approve of these days. The heat lightning of the apocalypse is in the air and Dean’s having trouble keeping himself convinced that he owes anything to anybody.

Dean Winchester is not introspective, but he’s always known that he’s tethered to this planet not especially because of who he is but because of who he can save, otherwise he would’ve directed a bullet at his brainpan years ago.

The hair of a thirty-three-year-old librarian (Sam’s kind, not Dean’s) turned completely white before she then promptly died of no discernible cause while demonstrating proper microfilm machine etiquette to a genealogy club in some outskirt even smaller than Enid, Oklahoma. The medical examiner in Oklahoma City found no plaque around her presumably sensible librarian’s heart, no bulging vein behind her forehead waiting to make her day. Some morgue intern’s “Sometimes folks just up and die,” quote has been making the rounds of the Weekly World Newses and their ilk, which is why Dean’s busting ass to figure out if it’s their- his kind of thing or just pills. A lot of these nowhere towns, it’s just pills.

Speaking of, there’s nobody now to sniff his disapproval if Dean’s eyes linger too long on the Stay-Awake display on the truck stop counter. (“It’s speed, Dean.”) But nah. Dean figures he’s handicapped himself enough hunting alone without adding wild eyes and chattering thirty-miles-a-minute during witness interviews. 

It’s third-to-first shift change at the county Sheriff’s Department. Dean would always rather catch the local law at end-of-shift when they’re clockwatching, but Sam swears by pulling the old razzle dazzle first thing before their morning coffee can kick in. He makes a face at himself in the rearview. Hopes his hooded eyes will show like dedication instead of desperation. A workaholic, that’s what Dean is.

The Sheriff’s Department’s green carpet speaks to municipal neglect, and the “aw shucks, hell if we know” answers he elicits are all he needs to know about the typical crime rate in Garber, Oklahoma.

The town consists of the library where the victim worked, a Baptist and a Methodist church, three bars and a Dairy Queen that must be hopping on Sunday afternoons.

Dean parks the Impala by the Dollar Tree at the end of what passes for a main drag. Still not sure this is his kind of thing, he lets himself pretend for a minute that he’s a cowboy moseying past the false storefronts on a Hollywood set.

Later he watches through the tinted windows of the first bar as a man wearing transition lenses, a too-big suit and no expression at all follows the casket out of the Baptist Church with one hand proprietarily fused to the wood like he’ll weld himself to it before he’ll ever let it sink into the ground.

“Ol’ Anson won’t take this well,” the bartender, a dude with a Santa Claus beard divided into two forks, says while eyeing Dean’s Fed suit.

“Wife?” Dean asks, knowing the answer.

Story goes like most of these stories go. Anson was a quiet boy before Vietnam. The bartender never served himself. Blew out his knee playing Pop Warner against the damn Osages. Angry gesture in the direction of what Dean assumes to be the Reservation, but Dean finally gleans that the ex-wife – “that’s her, with the teeth” – is ten-feet-fall next to her second husband on every real estate billboard between here and Wichita while the daughter stayed at home and tended to Daddy.

“Functional,” Dean remarks. Testing the pill theory, he leans in and asks Forkbeard where he can get something to help him with this pain in his shoulder, but Forkbeard only pointedly asks if his last beer will be cash or charge.

A burial’s-length of time later Agent Leon Durham – Dean isn’t thinking too much about why he keeps picking a particular type of alias – is at the second bar buying Anson one Miller High Life after the other at 2:40 in the afternoon.

“There’s nothing like war,” the victim’s father says. The wrinkles around his eyes look like cross stitches. “Nothing else can ever compete when it’s been just you, your rifle, and an enemy in the tall grass.”

“I buried my baby girl this morning,” he says. Dean knows this. It’s why he’s here after all. Just another snake in the tall grass. “I don’t remember a word that preacher said. But I remember Hill 861 like I’m climbing it still.”

The rack. The screams. The heat. Something in Anson’s thousand-yard stare hits a bullseye in Dean, who realizes he’s rubbing his thumb like an OCD case over a crack in the vinyl of his barstool. “Grounding” Doctor Fucking Phil called this “coping mechanism”, while talking to some guy who backed over his grandkid with his SUV and couldn’t seem to stop bursting into violent rages. Dean remembers trying it, rubbing his fingertips over the nubs of some bedspread then clenching a fist instead when Sam looked up from his laptop.

Dean’s starting to scare himself a little.

She was a good girl, Dean learns from Anson. But then don’t all daddies think that about their daughters?

Before Dean leaves, the old vet lights a cigarette then holds out his Zippo. His fingernails look like he pares them with a buck knife, too-long but clean. He watches Dean read the engraving, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley.”

“Brought this back from over there.” He gives a dry chuckle, or maybe it’s a smoker’s cough, on this, the day of his daughter’s funeral. To a man like this, “over there” will only ever mean one thing. Like how, for John Winchester, there could only ever be one “her.” 

Or for Dean there will only ever be one “him.”

This case is so fresh that local newspaper ink stains Dean’s hands as he pages through them at the local library, an open-plan Carnegie joint.

He has to wait for a librarian to finish reading something about caterpillars to apple-cheeked toddlers before he can case the microfilm machines. But Dean finds no EMF, no ecto, no hex bags or suspicious dust that hasn’t been there since the Carter administration.

An actual case in a library, Dean marvels. If Sam were here- but Sam’s not here.

He almost doesn’t stop in at the third bar in Garber. He’s checked in at the Great Plains Motel and his time would be better spent searching the lore for something besides Freddy Kreuger that would turn a vic’s hair stark white. But it’s also been four days since he’s had a woman. He’s been insatiable since he- Since thirty-nine days ago.

The tender is what Dean will sometimes remark to Sam a “Small Town Eight,” just so Sam will go all tight-lipped and scold him with big words like “objectification.” Blonde hair in waves, no ring, and young enough that she probably still thinks she’s on her way to somewhere else. For some reason that makes Dean feel proprietary and old at age thirty, but it doesn’t stop him from using his “the stars are so amazing way out here” line on her. But her smile is genuine, a cross between goofy and happy and, Dean knows without quite knowing how, reserved for someone else.

At the pool table, a wiry older guy with “Gus” on the sewn-in tag of his coveralls handily trounces a guy about Dean’s age and then looks around for takers. Dean’s hustled in the fed suit a few times. It tends to knock opponents straight out of their comfort zone.

Like this guy. “Sure golf ain’t more your speed, brother?”

Dean declines the wager on their first game – “We had a pool table back in the frat house, but it’s been a long time.”

After that the bored local pool shark actually starts giving him tips. This is going to be fun.

Next game. Eight-ball. Andrew Jackson on the foot rail. Dean, preparing to lose, gestures to the blonde tender for a refuel. But she’s hard to pin down, her eyes keep darting to the swinging door from where fried potato skins and atomic wings emerge at irregular intervals. Dean’s just deliberately whiffed the break when he notices her eyes finally light up like fireflies. He can’t help but follow her gaze to find out who’s the lucky guy and suddenly his mouth goes dry. 

“Sam,” he thinks.

“Keith!” she says.

Same as it always was, Dean’s brother is in color, while everyone else is in black and white. Some things never change no matter how many times the odometer turns over.

Dean’s allowed to be here. There’s a case here. But Dean’s eyes meet Sam’s with a magnetized snap and it’s like your high school crush catching you driving past her house.

Sam stands in the kitchen doorway as immovable as a stone. Instead of the shotgun that belongs in his two hands, he’s clutching a polypropylene busser’s tray, looking as out of place as a gladiator. Can’t these people see who walks here among them? Don’t they feel it?

Sam’s trying to fit in. A t-shirt a shade of gray Dean’s never seen on his brother before pulls across his broad shoulders, but his boots are the same.

Someone has trimmed his hair.

Dean knows he’s staring. But his brother has that stupid look on his face. What’s the word? Dumbfounded. Like he’s nine years old again and Dean has just showed him for the first time how to strip down a gun. It’s been nearly as long since Sammy aimed that look at him. Since he stepped on that Greyhound to California, really. Sam’s world has always been so much bigger than Dean’s.

Sam will think Dean has come to find him. The thought leaves him hot around his collar and at his cuffs. It will never occur to his little brother that out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world and all that. To disabuse him of that notion, Dean tries to look away without acknowledgment. But it’s like unmixing a drink, the impossibility of tearing his eyes from Sam now. It’s like a heart attack.

As far as Dean can tell, Sam never knew about Palo Alto. Dean watching him through the rain-glazed window of his favorite coffee shop, checking out his landlords, even once slipping into the off-campus apartment Sam shared with two dudes named Chris when he knew they were all safely geeking out in class. He’d opened drawers just to marvel at what Sam’s clothes looked like all folded and nestled in one spot for longer than it took to close a case. A place for everything and everything in its place. And no place for Dean, leaving invisible boot prints and enough traces that Sam could discover this trespass if he’d wanted to, if he were keeping his instincts honed hunter-fine.

“While you were on your break, we were all in here getting scurvy,” the tender says to Sam, gesturing to her dwindling supply of lime wedges. Lindsay she finally said her name was when Dean gave it another game try.

He wonders if it was this chick who draped a towel around those big shoulders and ran a wet comb through the ends of his hair in her kitchen in one of the shotgun rentals Dean drove past on his way into town. She’s more Sam’s type than his, he realizes now.

Dean hopes she’ll make him happy.

The tang of citrus cuts the air now and he can’t help but glance sidelong at Sam. His brother is behind the bar carving limes with a paring knife and Dean wants to warn him, “Not too fast, Sammy. Civilians will notice.” But they continue to pretend not to know each other like they have so many times before, usually for the purposes of starting up a hustle or conning a recalcitrant witness into spilling his guts. 

He’s not supposed to hear when Lindsay leans on her elbows on the bar and sotto voce asks, “You know that guy playing pool?”

“I just-,” Sam says, the _snicking_ rhythm of his knife never faltering. “I just thought I did.” And his brother might as well have plunged that little pig sticker directly into his gut and twisted. Sam never did leave exit wounds.

 _“I was expecting a fight,”_ he’d said, back at the base of Sundance Mountain. Right before he got into that truck and went to find his own life. This.

It’s Dean’s shot, he realizes. Hasn’t been paying attention to the table at all and most of his opponent’s stripes have found their way to pockets now. Dean has to unclench his right fist from around the cue to line up his shot. Thirty-eight days ago, he used the same fist to punch a hole through the drywall in room 101 at the Western Sun Motor Court in Lamar, Colorado, and the skin over his knuckles doesn’t seem to want to heal. It's cracking and seeping like a punishment. 

Now that he can pick out the timbre of his little brother’s voice ten feet behind him it’s easy enough to deliberately miss a tricky cut and then watch his opponent ease his eight ball into a side pocket. 

“Better luck next time, bud,” Gus says, genuinely offering Dean an out from their game. These are the safe hustles, the old guys secure in their skill, nothing to prove to no-damn-body. You don’t destroy guys like this, but you do leave two hundred or so up, marveling at your newfound prowess and offering to give the money back without ever worrying that offer will be taken, because guys like Gus have always known that money on the table equals a promise even if it also means rice and beans until payday.

Dean should go. Write the lost twenty off, shake Gus’s hand, get in the Impala and drive until he hits an ocean. Convince himself not to keep going.

But then Lindsay, her lips a moue of worry now, approaches him at the pool table with another whiskey. “On the house.”

Dean swallows. Remembers belatedly to leer at her. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“Not from me,” she says over her shoulder, and jerks her chin at Sam, who’s taking a tray of glasses out of the dishwasher and pointedly not looking their way.

Dean freezes. It’s a clumsy movement and causes her to nearly drop the rocks glass. If he takes this, what is he accepting? Acknowledgement? Or something else? Sam. Blood, obscene and slick on his chin. And how exactly is Dean supposed to accept that?

He’s making a scene, he knows. This pretty girl with better things to do is standing in front of him trying to hand him a free drink, and here he is with both hands wrapped around his pool cue like it’s Ruby’s throat and hesitating.

At the crossroads, he didn’t hesitate.

A very small voice in the back of his head, one that creeps up on him on moonless nights when all he can see is the white lines in his Baby’s headlights streaking together like falling stars, says that maybe Sam didn’t hesitate either.

Dean takes the drink, turns back to Gus – “My lucky night, I guess.” – and slaps the last three bills from his wallet on the rail. He’s stripes this time.

Turns out he underestimated Gus, who has to be some kind of undercover world class billiards protégé or something. They trade the bills a time or three, while more free neat whiskies arrive, but before Dean knows it, it’s last call in Garber, Oklahoma and Gus is scooping all but one twenty into his wallet with a last, “Always welcome to a rematch, bud.”

Sam’s voice behind him says, “That was hard to watch.” The first words his little brother has said to him in nine hundred and fifty-six hours. 

Dean swallows. Turns around. He’s staring, he realizes. He’s been so restrained, all these years. Restricting himself to side-eyed glances, peeks from under his eyelashes like a goddamn schoolgirl. But all it’s taken is a little over a month of separation and he’s drinking his brother in like he’s eight years old again and seeing a ghost for the first time. And he’s just as white hot panicked. Though he hadn’t shown it then and he won’t show it now.

“Warn a guy?” he says.

“I didn’t think you’d need my help.” A pause. “Agent.”

So that’s how they’re going to play it. Dean meets Sam’s gaze then. Some quality of the bar lights turns his brother’s eyes the color of faded bruises and Dean thinks, not for the first time, about how nobody’s supposed to know every facet of Sam like Dean knows Sam, but here’s his little brother, forever showing him something new.

“Agent. It that obvious?” He says this for Lindsay’s benefit. She’s hovering now, face showing more storm clouds and kicked puppies.

“Only if you’re looking.”

Dean turns back around. Begins racking for tomorrow night’s poor bastard. Doesn’t need Sam to see how his words can always bend Dean double, like a punch to the gut.

The day Sam left for Stanford, when it became obvious that this wasn’t another tantrum, that he was really going to cross the parking lot and climb those Greyhound steps, Dean stopped his brother by threading a finger through his belt loop. Sam had frozen. They’d both stared at Dean’s finger crooked through the denim band, thin line of grease under his fingernails from the shifts he’d picked up. Then Sam looked up at Dean, the backpack with all his worldly possessions causing him to hunch a little, and if Dean didn’t know better, he thinks the expression on his brother’s face meant Sam would have let him.

Let him do what, Dean’s never tugged that thread hard enough to conjure.

But instead of taking that chance, the one that could’ve, might’ve, earned him the one thing in this world that he’d ever really wanted, he’d yanked his hand back and shoved his fists in his pockets. Said, “Look after yourself, Sammy,” over his shoulder. He didn’t stick around to watch the bus pull away. Instead, he burned rubber out of the Greyhound Station lot and found a girl.

Then he buried his face into the crook of her neck, swallowed his brother’s name like splinters in his throat, and he wished to God he’d watched the bus pull away. 

He's always loved Sam wrong.

“You play?” he says suddenly, his mouth betraying him. “…Keith?”

“We had a pool table back at the frat house, but it’s been a long time.”

Dean finishes racking. Rolls the longest cue along the lip of the table for Sam. “Break.”

Sam eyes him levelly when he counters, “You break.”

Dean swallows. He’d forgotten the reality of Sam, the breadth of him. He was like a natural wonder, Dean’s brother. Something you could never quite photograph, never quite conjure up in your memory. Something you could only experience when you were in the presence of it.

 _“The problem is me,”_ Sam had said, back at that state park. _“How far I’ll go.”_

Dean knows that, in the end, when it comes to Sammy, it’ll always be him who breaks.

His break is slightly off and the 15 follows the 7 into a corner, so it’s Sam’s turn. His brother picks solids, his favorite. “What brings you to town, agent?” Sam asks, sinking the 6.

“Classified. Federal business.”

Sam sinks the 5, and, like Dean knew he would, lines himself up to take the 4. He’s showing off.

“UFO then?” Sam’s smiling, just a trace, though his eyes are only for the table as he lines up his next shot, and it’s been a long time since Dean has seen that sight. His brother stretches for his next shot, his body all impossibly long lines. He’s not the only one watching, Dean realizes.

He shrugs. “The truth is out there.”

“Where you staying while you’re in town?” he asks before taking the shot, and so that’s what they’re doing then. But Sam went too heavy for the side pocket, one of his perpetual weaknesses, and its Dean’s turn.

“I’ll ask the questions. How long you lived here in Garber, Keith?”

He sinks the 10 and the 14 at the same time, different pockets, and looks up to grin at Sam at his incredible feat of prowess before he remembers who he is. Who they are now. Old habits and all. For years there was very little Dean felt worth doing if it didn’t end with Sam looking at him with open-mouthed adoration.

“Just passing through,” Sam says. “No one would miss me when I’m gone.” 

Dean’s cue falters then. Too much backspin. It’s Sam’s turn again.

He lines up the yellow 1, aiming for the side pocket again to redeem himself. “So, where you staying while you’re here in town?” The 1 ball slides in smooth.

Dean swallows. “The Great Plains Motel down the street.” Unsure whether Lindsay is somewhere listening in he adds, “They uh- don’t give us much of a per diem.”

“It’s not that bad a place.” Of course he’d pick the same motel as Sam. They were trained in the same criteria after all.

Lindsay comes to stand behind Sam. “I’m out. Lock up, huh, Keith?” Any smiles she had for Dean are long gone now. When she leaves she turns the house lights up. A final parting shot.

His brother stands back to survey the table. Dean’s remaining stripes are in Sam’s way now, creating a minefield for his brother – no, Keith now – to wade through. They’re normally the other way around, Dean thinks.

Suddenly Dean remembers making the Keith Richards ID. On some long ago hunt, he forgets why now, he and Dad had needed to get Sam into a bar. He remembers leaning on the counter to flirt with some clerk in a New England Kinkos while it laminated. It figures the kid would have kept that one. Probably got a lot of mileage out of it when he was off at college becoming somebody else. And here Dean thought his brother had wanted to wash his hands of them. It makes him angry suddenly, that all Sam took with him were those practical things. That his brother didn’t spare a thought to the things he left behind.

It’s Dean’s turn now. He leans over and deliberately sinks the 8 ball.

Whatever this game was, it’s over.

Without looking at Sam, he returns the cue to the stand on the wall. Never let anybody say Dean Winchester doesn’t clean up his messes.

“Hey,” Sam says, as Dean strides toward the door. His brother’s voice has gone all ragged and thready. Dean’s heard that edge of desperation before, when Ruby’s blood still cleaved to his tongue. _“Dean. I’m asking you. For once. Trust me.”_

It’s stifling in here suddenly and all Dean needs is air.

But, “Hey,” Sam repeats. “What happened to your hand?”

Dean stops at the door, its window made opaque with alcohol stickers and flyers promoting local bands.

“It doesn’t matter. Sammy.”

For once, it’s Dean’s turn to walk away.

_To be continued..._

**Author's Note:**

> Friendly [rebloggable Tumblr link here.](https://crooked-sleep.tumblr.com/post/189749453929/the-drifter-wincest-fic)


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